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POSTSCRIPT.

A VERY extraordinary attempt having been lately made to undermine and destroy the reputation of Milton as a poet, it may be proper, for the sake of truth, and for the sake of a favourite author, to give a short history of it, here, in the conclusion of this work. Soon after I had published my proposals for printing a new edition of the Paradise Lost with notes of various authors, Mr. William Lauder, a Scotchman, came to me, exclaiming horribly of John Milton, and inveighing most bitterly against him for the worst and greatest of all plagiaries; he could prove that he had borrowed the substance of whole books together, and there was scarcely a single thought or sentiment in his poem which he had not stolen from some author or other, notwithstanding his vain pretence to things unattempted yet in prose or rhime. And then in confirmation of his charge, he recited a long roll of Scotch, German, and Dutch poets, and affirmed that he had brought the books along with him which were his vouchers, and appealed particularly to Ramsay a Scotch Divine, and to Masenius, a German Jesuit:

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but upon producing his authors, he could not find Masenius, he had dropt the book somewhere or other in the way, and expressed much surprise and concern for the loss of it; Ramsay he left with me, and my opinion of Milton's imitations of that author I have given in a note on IX. 513. I knew very well that Milton was an universal scholar, as famous for his great reading as for the extent of his genius; and I thought it not improbable, that Mr. Lauder, having the good fortune to meet with these German and Dutch poems, might have traced out there some of his imitations and allusions, which had escaped the researches of others: and it was my advice to him then, and as often as I had opportunities of seeing him afterwards, that if he had really made such notable discoveries as he boasted, he would do well to communicate them to the public; an ingenious countryman of his had published an Essay upon Milton's Imitations of the Ancients, and he would equally deserve the thanks of the learned world by writing an Essay upon Milton's Imitations of the Moderns; but at the same time I recommended to him a little more modesty and decency, and urged all the arguments I could to persuade him to treat Milton's name with more respect, and not to write of him with the same acrimony and rancour with which he spoke of him; it would weaken his cause instead of strengthening it, and would hurt himself more than Milton in the opinion of all candid readers. He began with pub. lishing some specimens of his work in a monthly

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pamphlet intitled the Gentleman's Magazine: and I was sorry to find that he had no better regarded my advice in his manner of writing; for his papers were much in the same strain and spirit as his conversation, his assertions strong, and his proofs weak. However, to do him justice, several of the quotations which he had made from Adamus Exul, a tragedy of the famous Hugo Grotius, I thought so exactly parallel to several passages in the Paradise Lost, that I readily adopted them, and inserted them without scruple in my notes, esteeming it no reproach to Milton, but rather a commendation of his taste and judgment, to have gathered so many of the choicest flowers in the gardens of others, and to have transplanted them with improvements into his own. length, after I had published my first edition of the Paradise Lost, came forth Mr. Lauder's Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns: but except the quotations from Grotius, which I had already inserted in my first edition, I found in Mr. Lauder's authors not above half a dozen passages, which I thought worth transferring into my second edition; not but he had produced more passages somewhat resembling others in Milton; but when a similitude of thought or expression, of sentiment or description, occurs in Scripture, and we will say in Staphorstius, in Virgil and perhaps in Alexander Ross, in Ariosto and perhaps in Taubmannus, I should rather conclude that Milton had borrowed from the former, whom he is certainly known to have read, than from the latter, whom it is very uncertain whe

ther he had ever read or not. We know that he had often drawn and delighted to draw from the pure fountain; and why then should we believe that he chose rather to drink of the stream after it was polluted by the trash and filth of others? We know that he had thoroughly studied, and was perfectly acquainted with the graces and beauties of the great originals; and why then should we think that he was only the servile copier of perhaps a bad copy, which perhaps he had never seen? This was all the use that I could possibly make of Mr. Lauder's Essay, and the most favourable opinion that I could entertain of him and his performance, admitting all that he had alledged to be true and genuine, was that the malice of his charge was much greater than the validity of his proofs: but what now if he should be found to have suborned false evidence in support of his accusation, and instead of convicting Milton of plagiarism, to have fixed an eternal brand of forgery upon himself? It was certainly very artful in Mr. Lauder to derive so many of his authorities from books, which are so little known, and copies of which are so very scarce, that the principal of them cannot be found in the best and greatest libraries and this stratagem had a double use, for at the same time that it served to display his uncom mon reading, it was also the means of his eluding the search of the most curious of his readers. I should myself have examined his authorities, if I could have procured the books; but for want of

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